Flowers Fall

Love is in the Air: Let’s Play Parenting Trivia!

by Bethany Saltman, January 30, 2009

It’s February. What better time to ask what we mean when we say “I love you”?

It seems that historians agree that parents have always loved their kids, maybe not in the super snuggly way that we love our kids, but in that impossible-to-describe way of just really caring about them. With that said, parental love has taken extremely different forms throughout our history and even now, in different parts of the world. I happen to think this difference is a gift, permission for all us parents to relax and realize there really is no one way to do this crazy job. Having a sense of the big picture, we can, to use the Buddhist term, detach a bit and learn how we came to hold our very dear opinions, rules, and preferences. And of course remembering what other people—parents and kids—have lived through can be very humbling.

So instead of a chalky heart inscribed with “Let’s be friends,” I offer this totally random, things-that-make-you-go-hmmmm…little quiz on parenting trivia. It’s my Valentine to all the good-enough parents out there.  

1) Of all the “Classical” civilizations, which promoted a mother-child bond most similar to contemporary “attachment parenting” and included breastfeeding on demand, sensitivity to an infant’s individual needs, potty-training “when ready,” and the like?
A) Chinese
B) Greco-Roman
C) Indian
D) All of the above
Correct Answer: C.) India. Due to the Hinduism practiced in India, children were viewed as one part of a web of ritualistic indulgence and appreciation, as opposed to the more authoritarian attitudes of other religions/cultures.

2) The New England Puritans were the first white Americans to:
(Choose as many as apply)
A) Consider breastfeeding a sin
B) Criminalize child abuse
C) Encourage child abuse
D) Discourage wet nursing in favor of maternal breastfeeding
Correct Answer: B.) and D.). Apparently, the Puritans’ concerns with a child’s nature, though believed to be sinful, encouraged a kind of conscious care, which made assault and battery less appealing. And in terms of nursing, as one Puritan minister so eloquently put it, “You will Suckle Your Infant your Self if you can; Be not such an Ostrich as to Decline it, merely because you would be One of the Careless Women Living While at Ease.”

3) When Colonial Americans swaddled a baby and then placed it on a hook on the wall, this was an early form of:
A) Daycare
B) Sleep training
C) Time-out
D) The doorway jumpy thing
Correct Answer: A.) Daycare. When mother and dad both had to go out to the fields and babies numbers 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 had not yet been born to watch baby number 1, apparently the hook-hang was the best way to keep the kid safe.

4) “That evel hour I loock forward to with dread” is an early American woman’s reference to:
A) Conjugal relations
B) Between 5 and 6pm, when her infant was colicky
C) Weaning
D) Childbirth
Correct Answer: D.) Childbirth. In the 17th-century US, between 1 and 1.5 percent of all births ended in a mother’s death. And remember, these women had seven or eight babies on average.

5.) Of all the “major” world religions, which considered childbirth a “polluting act”?
A) Christianity
B) Buddhism
C) Judaism
D) Islam
Correct Answer: B.) Buddhism. Oops.